Be anything you want – except a child actor

Cutting red tape will mean even more young thespians on our screens, writes Michael
Deacon.

My wife and I have yet to be blessed with children, but if we ever are, I pledge now that they will be free to pursue any dream they choose – no matter how futile, deluded and wrong-headed that dream may be. If they yearn to be pop stars, I shall take whatever measures I can to help, short of depositing them in a basket on Simon Cowell's doorstep. Ditto if they wish to be painters, poets, potters, pool players or pan-global drug smugglers. As long as it makes them happy, it'll make me happy too.

With one exception. I hope never to see the day when a child of mine comes to me and says: "Daddy – I want to be an actor."

Let me be clear. I have nothing against actors – provided, that is, that they are at least 18 years of age. My abhorrence is reserved exclusively for child actors.

Imagine my yell of horror, therefore, when I read yesterday that the Government is encouraging more children to take up acting. Tim Loughton, the children's minister, plans to review the child performance laws and remove "unnecessary" regulations that make it hard for amateur dramatic groups to cast children.

I have never met Mr Loughton, but it is with supreme confidence that I make the following guess: he grew up in a house in which watching television was forbidden. Because if, in his youth, Mr Loughton had been allowed to watch children's television, he would certainly not now be trying to cut "unnecessary" red tape. On the contrary, he would be ordering more of it, by the yard, with the aim of plastering it, like a gag, across the mouth of every child actor.

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That, at any rate, is what I would do, because I did get to watch children's television. Even as a child, I could see that child actors couldn't act. Well, of course they couldn't. They were children. Hiring a child actor makes no more sense than electing a child prime minister or letting yourself be operated on by a child dentist. Yet instead of giving young viewers a sensible diet of cartoons, television bosses to this day insist on commissioning children's dramas full of child actors – all of them exaggerating each movement as if playing charades with the partially sighted, and speaking as if in a gale because Mummy has told them to "project", and per-fect-ly e-nun-ci-a-ting ev-er-y syll-a-ble in exactly the way no child in real life does.

I concede that there recently emerged, by some unrepeatable fluke, three child actors who are competent. They are the three from Outnumbered, BBC One's very funny sitcom about a middle-class family. Then again, those three are in an unusual position, in that their characters are precocious, piping brats – which is how child actors always make their characters seem, even when those characters are meant to be angelically winsome.

Mr Loughton says that acting "helps children build their confidence". He seems to be labouring under the impression that this is a good thing. In fact, there are few sights more chilling than that of the confident child. Nobody who has visited a supermarket and witnessed the 21st-century child at work, marching its terrified parents towards the ice cream cabinet while blasting Justin Bieber from its mobile, can seriously claim that it is in need of more confidence.

If Mr Loughton wishes to help children, he should issue every school drama department with photographs of child actors, before and after their first burst of success. Drew Barrymore, in ET at six and a cocaine user at 12. Mary-Kate Olsen, a veteran of television at eight and in rehab with an eating disorder at 18. Lindsay Lohan, star of The Parent Trap at 12 and a jailbird at 21 (and again at 24). To prevent more such miseries, Mr Loughton must act – and the children must not.